Article Posting Offered By Craig Danuloff, President ClickEquations
This article is part of a series of blog posts provided by ClickEquations that goes ‘behind the scenes’ on paid search. See the full post here.
We wanted to share this insightful article about paid seach campaigns and how important it is to organize your ad groups. Most spend too little time building ad groups primarily because goals aren’t clear.
Here are the goals of an ad group that you should follow:
• To perfectly align questions (search queries) with answers (text ads).
• Every query that comes into an ad group should go into ad copy that directly addresses its topics, issues, intent, and desires.
• It not good enough for all the keywords in an ad group to be similar or narrowly focused or contextually similar or anything else.
• If the people whose queries come into a group don’t see text ads that satisfy them, the ad group is a failure.
Rebuilding Ad Groups: Ad group reorganization doesn’t happen a lot in large part because it isn’t easy enough to reorganize within our tools. Without a clear set of organizational goals how can you know that something is wrong or how you should fix it?
There is only one legitimate way to analyze the success of an ad group: make the list of search queries the ad group has attracted. Put this list next to the text ad copy that has been shown to the people who executed those searches. If the text ads on that list are not aimed at answering the question implied in the search query on the other list, then improve your ad groups.
The Ads Are The Targets: Here’s the basic idea – build ad groups around ads, fit in keywords that attract compatible queries, make ads the target (build a nice small target and then hit it). Build as many ad groups as you need, but make sure they are tight and focused.
Special Note: if you allow unaligned queries into your ad group, the downhill spiral begins:
• Queries that don’t target the ad copy get impressions but not clicks
• CTRs drop
• Good queries are under-served by inappropriate ads
• Quality score suffers for the keywords, target URLs
• Money wasted, and cost rise in the future
The key is to build highly targeted text ads then construct ad groups that only bring very specific people to them.
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Craig Danuloff, President of ClickEquations, a complete, easy-to-use paid search platform for large advertiser and agencies. For more free tips, check out the ClickEquations Learn section and their paid search blog.
